The media and the Muslim rioters have a certain amount in common. Both feel that they have not been treated with the respect they are entitled to, and are boiling over with rage as a result.

One crucial difference is that we really do need to keep most Muslims on our side, or at least neutral. In the case of the MSM, no such considerations apply. They declared open war on the Bush administration in 2004. The result was their Stalingrad. No matter how hard they tried they could not carry John Kerry across the finish line. But after the endless series of false and misleading stories aimed at defeating Bush the chances of their ever getting access from this WH were nil.

Now they are sliding more and more quickly towards irrelevance. Which makes them ever more angry and unhinged. Which makes them ever more irrelevant.

It has taken the GOP a while to catch on, but they are now starting to utilize the new media to get their message out.

I believe the 2008 election cycle will see the death of the old media. The Republican party will surely insist that some of the presidential debates be moderated by Brit Hume or a similar figure. Political news will increasingly be spread via the "new media" of cable TV, radio and blogs. To use an analogy which they are partial to, the Old Media are trapped in a quagmire. The Cheney story is the desperate flailing about of sinking journalists hoping to show that they still matter.

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“I believe the 2008 election cycle will see the death of the old media.”

This is what I’ve been saying for awhile. The elections of 2008 will not take place for another 32 months! That is an eternity in the world of fast paced technological advances.

Someone like Hillary Clinton has little chance without the full support of her legacy media friends. A drowning man is highly unlikely to pull you out of the water. He's too worried about saving hinself.

It is good that there is an awakening to who the enemy is,Islam is merely thr competition,it is the liberal left who is the enemy.They hate everything you stand for,on the other hand Islam hates every tenet of liberalism,time to get the two together.

Even rats have some fight in them,this particular set of rodents only "stick it to the man" if the man doesn't fight back.These particular surrender rodents have been using spurious moral arguments to browbeat ordinary decent people for decades,put them against the very thing they have been accusing conservatives of being and they cannot get back in their holes fast enough.

“If the legacy media are so irrelevant, why do we spend so much time discussing them?”

Who said that they are not relevant? They are still a force to be reckoned with. Nonetheless, there influence is declining at a rapid pace. A creature fighting for its last breath of life, we should not forget, can still be very dangerous.

If the legacy media are so irrelevant, why do we spend so much time discussing them?

-because it's incredibly frustrating that they don't fight openly and honestly; and because they affect our larger fight, they get on our nerves. As the cowards Peter makes them to be, they are behind the scenes doing sinister handicapping to favor the side or situation that will tolerate their distracting interregnum longest. I was just lookin up this quote, which i think is relevant here:

"The 'secular state' is a liberal state, but it is neither opposed to religion nor does it fancy itself the referee of religion. It is liberal because it knows that it is temporary, not because it imagines itself to be neutral." - Douglas Farrow

If Farrow is right, the MSM is playing both sides off against each other, while pretending it is not; and it is doing this because it is only interested in prolonging its own temporary existence.

If, in future, westerners cast off the MSM-liberal-secular state, we will need a new kind of "liberal" state, one that still separates church and state, while nonetheless somehow positively acknowledging the specific cultural or religious tradition from which its liberalism is spawned:

"The day of the Liberal Deist compromise is over, and we have come to the parting of the ways. Either Europe must abandon the Christian tradition and with it the faith in progress and humanity, or it must return consciously to the religious tradition on which these ideas were based. ... It must be recognized that our faith in progress and in the unique value of human experience rests on religious foundations, and that they cannot be severed from historical religion and used as a substitute for it, as men have attempted to do during the last two centuries." - Christopher Dawson

"The ideal of a social order based on justice and goodwill between men and nations has not lost its attraction for the European mind, but with the disappearance of the old Liberal optimism it is in danger of being abandoned as a visionary illusion. For it is a religious ideal and cannot exist without some religious foundation." - Christopher Dawson

If the Christians like Dawson are right, then Flenser's hopeful statement takes on new light: One crucial difference is that we really do need to keep most Muslims on our side, or at least neutral. In the case of the MSM, no such considerations apply.

-in other words, we must convince most Muslims to side against the radicals by half-acknowledging the liberal Christian tradition, while rejecting the MSM heresy that proposes a third way which deep down it knows is not realistic, and can only be a temporary distraction from the more basic choice. Deep down the heretics know the third way is a fantasy ideology, at odds with reality - with the need for good faith - but they cling to the fantasy because, lacking faith, they need something with which to face the future and can't face human reality without a fantasy.

As for the "moderate Muslims", what Flenser is saying, i believe, is that they must be encouraged to recognize a need to make a compromise with radical Islamic aspirations to convert the world, by recognizing and valuing some kind of alliance with a Judeo-Christian view of history. Can there be such a moderate Muslim ally? Perhaps only if they can learn to put their faith, not in a third way, but in something universally human that is beyond both Islam and Christianity, and that while we have only come to know this universal truth by respecting the particular revelation of Christian faith, Christianity's particular historical accomplishment can nonetheless be recognized and perhaps even adapted into Islamic faith because it is recognized as being at root a universal truth about God.

Perhaps the cynicism of the MSM is that deep down they doubt this will ever happen and can only believe in temporary heresies, third ways, to avoid facing up to otherwise inevitable conflicts.

Terrye,It will not work with those whose modus operandi is insult and outrage.The fact we choose to be different is an offence,you as an uncovered woman are an offence,this is and extreme masculist culture that has come up against the feminised West.It is not for nothing that Olaf the Socially Responsible,nee Blood Axe,has had to bend the knee,immigration allowed a view of hoe civilised and soft we have become,just like Ghandi they saw that we could be beaten.Our cringing classes know only how to oppress ordinary decent people,they are brilliant at enforcing a myriad halfwitted politically correct bans,but simply do not have the intestinal fortitude to enforce a no Jihad ban.